Everything else can wait, agriculture can’t.
Interpretation
Agriculture is a fundamental and urgent priority that cannot be postponed.
Norman Borlaug's quote emphasizes the critical importance of agriculture in sustaining life and society. It suggests that while many aspects of life can be put on hold, the processes that feed and nourish humanity must always take precedence, highlighting agriculture's role in food security and the well-being of the planet.
In practice
In a speech addressing climate change, this quote can remind audiences of the urgency for sustainable agricultural practices.
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago
We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life, we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.
We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.
Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.
Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce.
This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.
To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.
The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.
We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.
There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature.
It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.
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